New Release & Video: Okkervil River – Pulled Up The Ribbon

Okkervil River have released a new song and video Pulled Up The Ribbon, the second new track from their forthcoming album In The Rainbow Rain, out 27th April

The epic and esoteric video, directed by Christopher Good, follows the band as they embark on a mystical journey that seems to transcend time – take a look below…

“When I first started working on ‘Pulled Up the Ribbon” I felt really excited about the melody and the chords in a way that made me nervous, because I felt pressure to write lyrics for it and nothing seemed quite right,” says bandleader Will Sheff. “I started with something quite dark and violent, and it felt like a good direction but I kept hitting creative dead ends. And then I realized there was something in the melody and phrasing that seemed like it was about destruction and doom but also something else that felt like it was about creation and birth. So I decided to try to write a kind of praise song for the force behind all of those things

“The song started as a waltz ballad, briefly turned into a Motown-style number, and then we streamlined it and Will Graefe added that hook. I had heard some of the great vocal performances on our keyboardist Sarah’s album with her project Lip Talk and knew I wanted her to sing on the song, and she elevated it further. And then, when I took the song to Shawn Everett to mix, he stripped out a lot of the padding from the track and made everything more aggressive and skeletal, with the drums and bass way up in the mix, the beauty amped up but also the spooky stuff. This was the only one of Shawn’s mixes where there were no notes, no tweaking. He played me the track and I said ‘whoa’ and approved it and we moved on”

“It’s such a sweeping, rousing, almost elemental-sounding track,” says Christopher Good. “I immediately thought of the rock beach in Rockport, Massachusetts’ Halibut Point State Park as an appropriately evocative backdrop and then from there just let my mind wander!”

Okkervil River will also return to the UK in October for a headline show: